Grunts

by John C. McManus

  The Marines knew who was responsible for this barbarous attack and they were determined to round them up at a deliberate pace, rather than react with overwhelming force. “Iraqis would see harsh reprisal as an act of vengeance,” said Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the corps-sized I Marine Expeditionary Force, which was responsible for Al Anbar. His immediate subordinate, Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, concurred. He had no desire to make any attempt to seize Fallujah. He knew that fighting for the city would be costly. He understood that he did not have the resources or manpower to rebuild the city whenever the fighting did end, much less pacify and care for a quarter million hostile Fallujahns. What’s more, any attack on Fallujah needed an Iraqi stamp of approval, and the shaky provisional government in Baghdad was hardly on board with the idea.

  But American leaders, from Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremer to President Bush, found it impossible to ignore the disturbing pictures of the crowd and the burned bodies. The Fallujah attack was unique and visceral. Thus it had dramatic repercussions. Desecration of bodies is a major taboo in American culture. It had happened at Mogadishu in 1993, and Fallujah was an unwelcome reminder of this awful nightmare. In the view of Bush, Bremer, and Rumsfeld, the desecration represented a worldwide humiliation for the United States and a major challenge to the American presence in Iraq. So, the Fallujah attack could not go unpunished, mainly because of the power of the appalling images (notice the importance of information-age media in shaping strategic events). For these reasons, and out of sheer anger, Bremer and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, ordered, with Bush’s approval, the Marines to take Fallujah.

  General Mattis may not have liked the order, but he was determined to carry it out. In early April, his Marines set up a cordon of nine checkpoints around the city to seal it off. Fallujah is wedged between the Euphrates to the west, a rail line to the north, and the desert to the south and east. The city only spans a few miles across, making it possible to cordon it off, even with the Marines’ limited manpower. Engineers built berms to discourage movement at the edges of the city. The Marines only allowed food, water, and medical supplies to enter Fallujah. In early 2004, the population was probably about 300,000 people. Sensing what was in the offing, many of the locals began to leave in cars and on foot. The Marines screened them and allowed military-age males to leave only if they were with families. “The city is surrounded,” one platoon leader at a checkpoint commented. “It’s an extended operation. We want to make a very precise approach to this. We want to get the guys we’re after. We don’t want to go in there with guns blazing.”

  However, the pending attack, dubbed Operation Vigilant Resolve, was much more ambitious than that. Any attempt to take the city would require much in the way of blazing guns. The politicians and the brass provided very little strategic direction to Mattis beyond orders to take the town. Mattis filled the vacuum by laying out the objectives: apprehend the perpetrators and the many foreign fighters who had been massing in Fallujah for months, clear out all the heavy weapons, and reopen Highway 10 to American traffic. Four battalions, augmented by Army Delta Force and Special Forces soldiers, in all comprising about two thousand troops, would carry out the main assault, knifing into Fallujah from the northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeastern corners of town. The battalions comprised Regimental Combat Team 1, the modern incarnation of the old 1st Marine Regiment, with Colonel John Toolan, a reserved Brooklyn native of Irish heritage, in command. His ground troops could call upon support from AC-130 Spectre gunships, attack helicopters, unmanned aerial observation aircraft, and Air Force F-15s. As the assault proceeded, the Marines planned to inundate the city’s inhabitants with leaflets and loudspeaker pronunciations that emphasized the Americans’ strength and benevolent intentions. As one officer put it: “This is a flash bang strategy. Stun the bad guys with aggressive fire, then psyops [psychological operation] the shit out of them, always coming back to the theme of the inevitability of the superior tribe.”2

  On the evening of April 4, after listening to a slew of fiery pep talks from their commanding officers, the Marines began their push into the city. Opposition consisted of about two thousand insurgents of varying quality and commitment. They were a mixture of Saddam loyalists, members of local tribes that opposed the American presence, youthful adventurers, former Iraqi Army soldiers, and hard-core jihadis, both local and foreign. They were armed with AK-47 rifles, RPK machine guns, mortars, and copious amounts of RPGs. Rather than one entity with one commander, they were a patchwork of insurgent organizations under the loose control of various leaders. The insurgents usually fought in teams of five to ten men. The Marines generally referred to them as “muj,” short for mujahideen, or holy warrior.

  Fallujah’s narrow streets, sturdy buildings of brick, mortar, and concrete, and even many of its historic mosques comprised ideal fighting positions for these men. “Generally, all houses have an enclosed courtyard,” one Marine infantryman wrote. “Upon entry into the courtyard, there is an outhouse large enough for one man. Rooftops and a large first-story window overlook the courtyard. Most houses have windows that are barred and covered with blinds or cardboard, restricting visibility into the house. The exterior doors of the houses are both metal and wood.” Often the doors were protected by metal gates. Most of the structures were two stories and had only a couple of entry points. The rooms were “directly proportionate to the size of the house.” In some cases, cars and buses blocked the likely avenues of the American advance.

  The first night featured many sharp clashes, but the fighting intensified after daylight on April 5. Clad in body armor, laden down with weapons, ammunition, and equipment, the infantry Marines arduously worked their way block by block, deeper into Fallujah. The enemy fighters mixed with noncombatants, creating a broiling, confusing mass of humanity. One group of Marines saw an RPG-toting man stand among a crowd of women and children, aim his weapon, fire, and then run. Reluctant to fire into the crowd, the Marines chased him but he disappeared into the urban jungle. This scenario repeated itself countless times. Quite often, the Marines took to the rooftops and traded shots with insurgents across the street, or a block or two away. The key for the grunts was to stay away from the streets and crossroads.

  When clearing buildings, the Marines spread themselves into a staggered, linear stack formation, against an exterior wall, near a door or other entryway. In the recollection of one grunt, as the point man burst into the house, “each Marine in the stack looks to the Marines to his front, assesses the danger areas that are not covered, and then covers one of them.” They held their rifles erect, at their shoulders, ready to fire. Each man covered a corner of the room they were clearing. The key was to spend a minimum amount of time in “fatal funnels”—doorways, hallways, and other narrow spots where they were especially vulnerable to enemy fire. All too often, in this three-dimensional game of urban chicken, they came face-to-face with bewildered, frightened civilians. In most cases, the Marines did not speak Arabic and had no translators with them. They tried to tell the people to leave town, that the Marines were there to apprehend terrorists (or “Ali Babas” in local parlance), but communication was limited. Some of the people did leave. Others did not wish to leave their homes unprotected from the excesses of both sides. Most had no love for the Americans.

  By midday on April 5, firefights were raging all over the city. “There was nothing fancy about this,” an embedded correspondent wrote. “This was the classic immemorial labor of infantry, little different from the way it had been practiced in Vietnam, World War II, and earlier back to the Greeks and Romans.” Lieutenant Christopher Ayres and a squad from Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines (1/5), cornered a sniper and dueled with him in an alleyway. The lieutenant, a Texan who had entered the Corps as an enlisted man, came face-to-face with the sniper. “We both emptied a magazine, but didn’t hit each other.” The insurgent’s AK r
ounds whizzed past Ayres and bounced off the alley walls. Chips from the wall nicked Ayres in the face. The sniper ran away, with Ayres’s squad and another group of Marines in hot pursuit. As they did so, they came under more fire from a house. An enemy riflemen shot one Marine in the throat and another in the thigh. Using the stack method, the Marines assaulted the enemy house with grenades and rifle fire. In the melee, they captured three enemy fighters who were carrying grenades and rifles. There were also two women and five children in the house, but somehow they did not get hurt.

  In the kitchen, a stalwart guerrilla shot First Lieutenant Josh Palmer, hitting him three times in the side, killing him. One of Palmer’s squad leaders put a bullet through the insurgent’s head. When Ayres arrived in the kitchen, he recognized the dead man as the sniper he had dueled with in the alley. “When they were searching the dead guy, they pulled up his shirt and found a pull cord attached to a white canvas suicide vest packed with blocks of C-4 explosive,” Ayres said. “Thank God a Marine dropped the sniper dead in his tracks before he could pull the cord.” The Marines left the kitchen, rolled a grenade in there, and bolted from the house. The explosion detonated the man’s suicide vest, blowing him to bits and leaving a three-foot-long trench in the remnants of the kitchen floor.

  Ayres and his cohorts were part of a battalion effort to sweep through the industrial sector of southeastern Fallujah. The shabby streets teemed with run-down factories, warehouses, garages, and junkyards. Faces covered by keffiyehs, insurgents darted from structure to structure, snapping off RPG shots, spraying wildly with their AKs. The RPGs exploded twice—once when the gunner pressed the trigger and then again when the warhead impacted against its target. “We all crouched up against a wall as bullets whizzed by,” Robert Kaplan, a leading military commentator who had embedded himself with Bravo Company, 1/5, recalled. “As the marines consolidated the position, the whistles turned to cracks and we stood up and relaxed a bit.” Through binoculars, they could see the enemy fighters some one hundred meters away. “Men armed with RPG launchers, wearing checkered keffiyehs around their faces, could be seen surrounded by women and children, taunting us. Only snipers tried to get shots off.”

  A few blocks to the west, Lance Corporal Patrick Finnigan and his fire team from Charlie Company were in the middle of a whirlwind firefight with a dizzying array of muj fighters. “They had . . . sniper teams, machine gun teams, guys that were organized in four-man groups with Dragonovs [sniper rifles], RPGs,” he said. “They had homemade weapons too that would shoot rockets that were just obscenely big, but not very accurate.”

  Finnigan was an Irish Catholic kid from suburban St. Louis who had joined the Corps after 9/11 for a complicated blend of reasons—patriotism, his parents’ impending divorce, and because his college career had stalled. He was a veteran of the initial invasion of Iraq the year before. Like most every other Marine in his outfit, he had heard about the mutilated Americans and he was excited to take Fallujah and destroy the insurgency there. “It was basically an all-day fire exchange with the enemy, pushing ’em back. That was pretty crazy. We were getting attacked from buildings, so we were taking positions behind . . . dirt mounds returning fire, doing fire and maneuver . . . and trying to close with them as much as we could.” At one point, an RPG streaked past him and hit a Humvee behind him. Small fragments sprayed him all over his body. Each of the hits felt like “somebody holding . . . some fire on your skin.” Corpsmen evacuated him to an aid station, where doctors gave him morphine and carefully picked out each fragment they could see. After the morphine wore off and the doctors had removed as many pieces as they could find, he returned to duty.

  By and large, grunts like Finnigan were on their own during the push into the city. Their fire support came mainly from mortars as well as the Mark 19 grenade launchers, .50-caliber machine guns, and shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapons (SMAW) from the battalion Weapons Company. Air support mainly consisted of Cobra helicopter gunships. The entire regimental combat team had only one company of M1A1 Abrams tanks from the Marine 1st Tank Battalion. They generally operated in pairs, helping the infantry wherever they were needed. Tank drivers sometimes had difficulty maneuvering their formidable beasts through the city. Tank commanders often had problems pinpointing the location of enemy fighters, even when taking fire from them. “It was very difficult to determine the direction, distance, and location of enemy rifle fire,” Captain Michael Skaggs, the tank company commander, later said. “These sounds echoed around buildings, and the enemy remained concealed within dark areas. For tankers, muzzle flashes and rifle firing signatures were difficult to locate unless they had a general location to look.” Usually, they were dependent upon the infantrymen to point out targets, often by firing rifle or machine-gun tracer rounds at the targeted building or street. At times, the tanks could be vulnerable to close-quarters enemy attacks if they did not have infantry support. For instance, Lance Corporal Finnigan was behind a mound, covering one tank that was close to a house, when he saw a teenager attempt to drop explosives down onto it from a rooftop. “It was only a hundred-meter, or two-hundred-meter . . . shot. I just put the triangle on the square and squeezed the trigger and he fell instantly.” The ensuing explosion collapsed the entire roof of the building, but the tank was unscathed.3

  The fighting raged on like this for three more days, with the Americans inflicting serious punishment on both the insurgents and the infrastructure of Fallujah. Militarily, the Americans were winning. General Mattis estimated that he needed only two or three more days to take the entire city. Politically, though, the Americans were on the verge of a catastrophe because of the unfair perception in Iraq and elsewhere that the Americans were unleashing destruction with impunity. In general, they tried to launch air strikes as judiciously, and with as much precision, as possible. They attempted to limit the destruction wrought by tanks, mortars, and other weapons. They especially hoped to avoid shooting at mosques, but when they took fire from the mosques, they returned it. Those journalists who were embedded with Marine infantry units attested to American restraint, although they were not in a position to see what was going on beyond the Marine lines.

  The sad fact was that it simply was not possible to assault a sizable city without killing innocent people and wrecking private property. “Civilian casualties are accepted as inevitable in high-tech, standoff warfare,” the military analyst and Marine combat veteran Bing West once wrote. “The infantryman does not stand off. The grunt must make instant, difficult choices in the heat of battle.” For the average Marine infantryman, it could be quite difficult to determine who was a noncombatant and who was not. Men of all ages sometimes took potshots with RPGs or rifles, discarded the weapons, and then melted into crowds or buildings. Unarmed people, especially teenagers, watched the Marines and relayed information to the insurgents in person or on cell phones. Even women sometimes gathered intelligence in this fashion. Other unarmed men hid in buildings, spoke with mobile mortar teams on cell phones, and called down fire on the Americans. For the Marine grunt, any Fallujahn who was capable of walking and talking could potentially be a threat. How could he know which Iraqi was simply talking to a friend on his phone and which was passing along information to insurgents on the next block? Needless to say, the environment was unforgiving.

  As the fighting raged, General John Abizaid, the theater commander, claimed that the commanders at Fallujah had “attempted to protect civilians to the best of their ability. I think everybody knows that.” But everyone did not know or believe that. Quite the opposite was true, actually. Worldwide media reports teemed with claims that the Americans were wantonly killing large numbers of civilians in Fallujah. One New York Times report, filed from Baghdad, told of a wounded six-year-old boy whose parents had been killed by American bullets. The boy told the Times reporter, Christine Hauser, of seeing his brothers crushed to death when their house collapsed under the weight of bombs. “Iraqis who have fled Falluja [sic] tell of random gunfire,
dead and wounded lying in the streets, and ambulances being shot up,” Hauser wrote. A subsequent story, filed this time from Fallujah itself, reported one gravedigger’s claim that, in the town cemetery, “there are [two hundred fifty] people buried here from American strikes on houses. We have stacked the bodies one on top of the other.”

  Arab media outlets, such as the notoriously anti-American TV network Al Jazeera, carried the most incendiary declarations of American-led destruction. As the fighting raged in Fallujah, the insurgents welcomed Al Jazeera reporter Ahmed Mansour and his film crew into the city. Mansour and his crew filmed many scenes of wounded Iraqis at Fallujah’s largest hospital. The images were awful—mutilated children, sobbing mothers, horribly wounded old people, blood-soaked beds, harried doctors and nurses, and dead bodies, including babies. The ghastly scenes ran continuously in a twenty-four-hour loop. The clear implication was that the Americans were wantonly killing and maiming. Hospital personnel claimed that the Americans had killed between six hundred and a thousand people. Because any Western journalist entering the insurgent-held portions of the city risked being kidnapped and beheaded, the Al Jazeera footage and claims comprised the main image of Fallujah before the world. Thus, the insurgents controlled the crucial realm of information, shaping world opinion—and more important, Iraqi public opinion—in their favor.

  As with so much media reporting in the Internet age, the problem was lack of context. The visceral hospital scenes were horrifying to any decent human being. But the circumstances that caused this death and destruction were vague. Were these people deliberately targeted by the Americans? Had they actually been wounded and killed by American bombs, shells, or small arms? Or had the insurgents done the damage? Were the civilians perhaps caught in the middle of firefights raging between the two sides? Had they clearly indicated their status as noncombatants? The pictures answered none of these reasonable questions. They only stood as accusatory portraits, with no corroboration, against the Americans, for the human suffering they had allegedly caused. By this time, insurgent groups in Iraq were masters at controlling information, using the Internet to spread anti-American propaganda and shaping the world’s perception of the war in their favor.